In one of my first dance classes we were handed photocopied pages of hand drawn dancers displaying the basic body positions. While these pages helped, the teachers were basically powerless to make changes to the illustrations to demonstrate variations in style or syllabus. And frankly the illustrations did not clearly show turnout, feet positions, and so on.

What the teacher needs in this situation is control. That is, the ability to put illustrations on paper that match what she wants the students to learn.

This not-so-simple task initiated the creation of this entire web site. I'd like to introduce our very own cyber-dancer "Digi" as seen here in first position. Digi is now almost two years old and was the first artwork that I commissioned from Anthony Noa.

Okay, so maybe Digi will never make the cover of your favorite magazine. She is designed to teach, not win beauty contests. 

Digi should see the light of day, problem is we'll never please everybody with our Digi poses -- with several popular styles of ballet being taught, and with variations within those styles, we'll never get it 'just right' for the majority. What to do?

t's time to move beyond being stumped on this issue and come up with something that might be useful. Instead of trying to address all the poses possible, I've created a 'parts bin' approach that lets you make your own Digi library.

With this selection of upper and lower body poses you can mix - and - match to create a nice collection of complete dancers.

If you need further refinements or poses we've not created, the groupings we provide can be disassembled and modified to give you even more flexibility. These illustrations are provided only in vector, rather than bitmapped formats, so they can be sized to fit a billboard without getting jaggy when printed.

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This distinction between bitmapped and vector artwork may seem a little arcane. Quickly, bitmapped artwork is created in 'paint' software, or results from a scan of a photo or video capture. It is said to have a 'resolution' (as in dots-per-inch), and a finite size (as in 300 pixels or 2 inches tall). A bitmap of an eye is shown here, zoomed in some 3000% from the original scan.

ector artwork is a series of shapes created in a 'drawing' program. The shapes can be simple, as in a circle, or complex paths. The shape edge can be a visible or invisible line of any thickness or color, the shape center can be also be any color. Digi uses no visible shape lines, but she does consist of white shapes laying on top of black shapes. When you zoom into these vector shapes the colors stay true and you don't get the pixels you see in the bitmapped eye above.

If you use tons of shapes, each slightly overlapped and using a different color you can produce work that is nearly photographic in quality. The vector eye show here is also zoomed to 3000%. If I intended for this eye to be displayed at this size / zoom level I'd need to get in and draw more detailed eyelashes, eyebrows, and use many more shapes to smooth out the shading.

Because Digi is a collection of a collection of shapes, she can be broken apart and reassembled with no drawing skills. If you can draw you can nudge a particular body part into just the right shape.

To work with Digi you need the right tools. Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Micrografx Draw / Designer, Microsoft Publisher and other vector drawing programs will all work fine. Your best bet however is Xara Webster or Corel Xara, produced by Xara Ltd. These Xara programs come highly recommended for PC owners because they are faster, easier, more stable, and far better than the competition. The other programs generally display jaggy work on screen but print ok. Xara (say: zahra) always looks great.

P.S. If you take Digi to the studio and find interesting uses for her, send us a post card and tell us how she is doing. We'd love to hear all about it.